In the art world, there’s a term called pentimento, meaning an alteration, an overlay on a painting, hiding evidence of traces of a previous work. In a similar vein, British physicist and former Stephen Hawking colleague, Sir Roger Penrose and his team, argue is that extinct universes exist that were filled with ghost black holes that are hidden, embedded in the Cosmic Microwave Background map.

“According to British physicist, Sir Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, the universe goes through an infinite series of “aeons,” each of which starts with a phase resembling a big bang, then forming galactic structures as usual, then cooling down as stars die. In the end the only thing that’s left are evaporating black holes and thinly dispersed radiation.”

“Empty space seems to be nothing to us. By analogy, water may seem to be nothing to a fish – it’s what’s left when you take away all the other things floating in the sea. Likewise, empty space is conjectured to be quite complicated,” Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.